Kong is Dead

Kong is dead¹. My Kong was, of course, my dissertation – a document which I sent to the publishers this afternoon. My Kong may not have been a 40-ton Megaprimatus or even a 400-pound Silverback for that matter, but it did clock in at nearly 400 single-spaced pages, much to the chagrin of my committee. I will likely not make my dissertation easily available (i.e., by hosting a PDF on my website) until all of the material in it has been published, but I am willing to guess that this is not a fact that concerns you (Dear Reader). What I am happy to immediately share, however, is the Acknowledgments section of my dissertation, given that the purpose of such a section is, ironically, to thank a group of people who by definition are among the least likely to read your published dissertation (due to hyperfamiliarity with your work or lack of technical background). In fact, I will share that section in this very post.

Acknowledgments

They say it takes a village to raise a graduate student. Well, at least I’ve said so. Surely we can agree that there exists at least one person p such that p says that it takes a village to raise a graduate student. Existence proof: myself. I would also count myself as an existence proof for this (now well established) aphorism, as there are simply too many people who deserve thanks for their inspiration, assistance, and camaraderie over the past six years.

I must begin, of course, by thanking my advisor, Matthias Scheutz, for making me the researcher, writer, and presenter I am today; for keeping me on track, while supporting me when my path diverged; for giving me the opportunity to travel the world; and for giving me a world of opportunities. It has been an absolute honor to work with him, and I consider it enormously and improbably lucky that he took a chance on me and took me into his laboratory.

I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee; Anselm Blumer for his mentorship as I begin my career as an educator, and Candy Sidner and J.P. de Ruiter both for pushing me to make this dissertation the best it can be. All four of my committee members have been truly inspirational to me, and have each motivated me to be rigorous in my research, with respect to my writing and argument (Matthias) my cognitive grounding (Candy), my algorithms and theory (Anselm), and my methodology and analysis (J.P.).

I couldn’t ask for better labmates than I’ve had in the Human-Robot Interaction Lab. While all of my current and former labmates have been a pleasure to work with, I’d especially like to thank Gordon Briggs, Evan Krause, and Matt Dunlap, for their conversation, collaboration, commiseration, constant inspiration, and of course for the carbonation and colonization, which is to say, for the well-hopped board gaming sessions.

Outside of the lab², I would like to thank Mike Shah, who has been a great friend on this amazing journey. On the other side of the pond, I’d like to thank Michael Beetz and the members of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Uni-Bremen, especially Fereshta Yazdani, for one of the most interesting, adventurous, and information-dense months of my life. I would like to give a shout out to my AI-HRI colleagues, including Rick Freedman, Ross Mead, Brad Hayes, and Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, who have been a pleasure to work with, who have motivated me to become deeply engaged with our research community, and who have simply become great friends. Finally, I would like to thank Out of Range for the best two hours of my week, every week. It is hard for me to express how great a blow it is for me to leave them; I don’t want to stop at all³.

None of this would have been possible without the love and support of my family. I’d especially like to thank my mom – who has been my biggest cheerleader – not only for believing in me, but for always making sure that I believed in myself. Finally, I’d like to thank Rachel for helping me find the appropriate balance between sanity and insanity, for making sure I remember to eat and come home, and, well, for everything. I am so excited for this next step in our life together.

1: Cf. GRRM’s nomenclature re: A Dance with Dragons
2: Contrary to popular belief, graduate students do on occasion leave their natural laboratorial habitat.
3: Bonus footnote (this footnote did not originally appear in my dissertation, and is provided to you, free of charge, as a token of my appreciation) Cf. Andrus, Glum, Holmes, Lotz, Robinson, Weaver, and Williams 2017